What Happened At Dresden In February, 1945?

Among the most controversial issues pertaining to death and destruction during World War II was the famous British-American raid on Dresden, just a few months before the end of the war. It is clear the day plus night assault produced a firestorm that killed thousands of people who were crammed into the city as German civilians fled both Russian and American-British troops. Many far-right groups cite the figure of up to 500,000 deaths in order to justify the killing of millions of people by Nazi troops in order to assert there were “atrocities on both sides.” An official group, the Dresden Historians’ Commission, after years of research concludes about 25,000 died during the air raids. It also concluded the number of refugees who fled the area and later die was much lower than previously believed.

War is hell. People die. But, there is a difference when death occurs during a military operation and when it is a well designed plan by a government to kill each and every person who is part of a group.

Perhaps, this commission might be a model to finally resolve the issue of how many Armenians died in Turkey over 90 years ago.

It didn’t. It destroy almost the whole of Dresden. Some suburbs were spared, barely.
What they left out was the aftermath.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel ‘Slaughterhouse Five’, he describes digging into the debris of Dresden as the beginning of the corpe mining, where they found hundreds of untouched bodies, many of whom had fled into cellers to avoid the flames and quickly suffocated for lack of oxygen as buildings above them collapsed. Boiled bodies were found in great pools of standing water.
Refugees fleeing the Red Army varied from Prisoners Of War (POW) to even teenage girls.